Sunday, December 16, 2012

Scott Walker has been looking uncharacteristically moderate and puncturing conservative trial balloons of late - - dropping his call for an end to election-day voter registration, sorta backing away from 'right-to-work' legislation and pulling an almost half-million dollar upgrade to the Governor's Mansion kitchen facilities from a State Building Commission agenda.

You can give Walker a pass on any of these matters, take him at his word, and dismiss that he is remaking himself before the 2016 presidential season, but do so at your peril.

Walker has forfeited the right to have his words taken at face value because there has been a two-faced history to his behavior as Milwaukee County Executive and as Governor.

As County Executive, he pledged - - his words - - reform, government integrity and transparency, but presided over an administration where key aides set up and used a secret and partisan communications system a few yards from his office - - right in the County Courthouse - - and where the commission of illegal activities on public time are sending former staffers to reformer Walker to jail and prison.

Walker also withheld during the 2010 gubernatorial campaign that he would spring on public employees a politically-calamitous bill to end nearly all their collective bargaining rights.

Milwaukee River empties into Lake Michigan

Wisconsin wind farm, east of Waupun

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What water, wetland protection is all about

"A little fill here and there may seem to be nothing to become excited about. But one fill, though comparatively inconsequential, may lead to another, and another, and before long a great body may be eaten away until it may no longer exist. Our navigable waters are a precious natural heritage, once gone, they disappear forever," wrote the Wisconsin Supreme Court in its 1960 opinion resolving Hixon v. PSC and buttressing The Public Trust Doctrine, Article IX of the Wisconsin State Constitution.